Improve your battery life with Activity Monitor

OS X Mavericks introduced a new tab in Activity Monitor: Energy. The nice thing about this new pane is that it includes an average. If you run on battery a lot, and are looking for ways to maximize your battery life, this gives you instant insight into the power hogs on your system:

I'm definitely not going to kill Chrome or Propane, but it's interesting to notice that the simple Little Snitch Network Monitor is using so much battery, compared to Evernote for example (which is also running all the time). A quick change of settings and you get an instant battery win:

Looking at this section regularly, I was able to tweak the settings of a few applications (I'm looking at you Crashplan) and got a noticeable improvement in overall battery life. I've also been enjoying FruitJuice, which tells you when to plug and when to use the battery.

So if you are running Mavericks and looking for ways to maximize your time away from an outlet, take a look at Activity Monitor: it's fast and easy.

That's it for today, cheers!